May contain nuts.

We've had a plan for a while now for gathering the stats from cronusX and displaying them in widgets on a custom page. We weren't allowed to data mine the version of cronusX on Candystand, we're only go to do it in the viral version, which is good 'cause it actually buys us some time to get them done.

We managed to get some data when we were beta testing the game, so there are some figures for test data ( I did a quick post with some stats here ).

First widget is the number of asteroids destroyed, here's a clipped screeny

Rather than just having a number and that's it, I'm trying to liven these widgets up by hopefully making them interesting. One thing the uk newspapers love doing is when say a new Dinosaur is discovered, they compare it to either black cabs or double decker buses, as apparently if they just put a figure we can't picture it. Shove a bus next to it, and we get it.

So in the spirit of a dumbed down newspaper article, I thought let's compare the weight of the total number of asteroids destroyed to double decker buses.

Figuring out the value is where it gets boring, and as it bored me I'm just passing it on. We're all about sharing. Plus regular readers will know every single time I put any sort of maths on here I get it wrong, so this post is like a sanity check for my calculations.

How big is an asteroid in the game ? Around 96 pixels. The player ship is around 45 pixels, so my train of thought was to set a real life size for the ship, multiply that by 4, and that would be the cubic size of an asteroid. I figured I'd just compare the ship to something in real life, and a F-15 Eagle seemed a good size. They're 63 feet long so let's pretend our ship is 63 feet long and wide too.That makes our 96 pixel asteroid 252 cubic feet. In meters that's 76. The reason to covert to meters ? 'Cause this page gives us the some nice weight figures which need meters. Apparently we're looking at 3 tons per cubic meter, therefore our rocks weight is 76*3=228 tons. We're nearly there. All we need now is the all important weight of a bus, and the net never lets you down does it ? I went for unladen which is 12 tons. Almost there.

(numberOfRocks*228)/12

That's it. All this effort just for a stat. I think there are going to be another 8 or so widgets, so I'm going to have to come up with more silly things to compare the stats to. Now best you move along otherwise you're going to be asleep soon.

'cause we'll be the only ones hosting these widgets we can easily swap and change things depending how things are going, so say the game takes off and the number of buses starts getting insanely high, then we can swap that out and replace it with say battleships.

Cheers for the feedback mate, I wish more people would post great ideas for us to steal :)